As any steampunk will gleefully tell you, the Victorian era was a period of incredible discovery, where scientific breakthroughs occurred at an astonishing rate. Which was the perfect environment for a book like Scientific Amusements to be published - a hodgepodge of science, illusion, party tricks, naturalism, and more under a single banner.

Parts of it are still classic science experiments to this day — after all, it begins with a discussion of mass and falling bodies. But some of the other sections are more like bar bets (page 7's Match Problem), party tricks (the useful to this day way of opening a wine bottle without a cork, page 25), and the sorts of optical illusions that are still found in children's science books.

But for the really fun stuff, have a gander at "chemistry without a laboratory" for a tour of at-home science that'd be a lot harder to get away with in this day and age.